Daily Excerpt: Learning to Feel (Girrell)
excerpt from Learning to Feel (Kris Girrell) --
3
We See the World as WE Are
Let me start this with a little true story: When I was a child, my family lived in Germany on a military base. We kids played outside on the stoop and sidewalks since there were not any playgrounds to speak of. On one particular day I was on the landing outside the entrance playing with a truck or some cool toy. The others were scattered around the sidewalk three or four steps down from the landing. When asked if I would share my toy with the others, I refused and was very possessive about it. This set the other children off and they started teasing and mocking me for being “stingy.”
The more they taunted me the angrier I got until I hit some sort of breaking point. I was as enraged as a four-year-old boy could be. Standing up, I noticed one of the bricks—a half brick, actually—along the side of the steps that was loose. In my anger, I picked it up and threw it at the other kids and it struck one of the boys on the side of the head. His face and head were a bloody mess in a matter of seconds, and I got frightened. I ran into the apartment and hid under the kitchen table.
This vision was something I carried with me for decades, along with the lesson that I was a mean and hurtful person who could do damage. But in my late thirties, I was attending a transformational training that challenged us to unearth and check into our long-held self-concepts. In the process, that memory popped up. So, I decided to call my sister who, at two years my elder, was my constant companion and protector when we were kids.
Though she remembered the time I hid under the table crying, she did not recall the brick incident. She recommended I call our mother. Mom’s answer was clear and shocking. “Living in the barracks,” she said, “we mothers were always in contact with each other. If anything like that had happened, I would have known about it immediately. That never happened.”
Wait. What? This event that was so clearly remembered, so vivid a memory in my mind, never happened? Then what really (must have) happened was that a little boy (who, by the way, had neither the strength or the physical acumen to throw a brick and actually hit someone with it) was so angry that he made up a scene he only wished could be. It became a memory as strong as any real experience I had growing up. Not only that, but it had become the foundation of a belief that I was mean, evil, and hurtful, and could do damage to others. As I grew into being a large man, this memory and belief was extrapolated to my strength and physical abilities. I had to be careful, because I could easily hurt someone!
But learning that it never happened was profound—I might even call it earthshaking. I suddenly was released from the belief in my latent violent tendencies. I was lifted out of the self-imposed darkness in which I had been operating for most of my life. Not only was I freed, I became skeptical of my deepest held beliefs about myself. How, then, do I know what is real and what is interpreted or even made up? This epistemological quandary has both haunted and served me ever since.
How do we know what we know? The great philosopher René Descartes (the “I think therefore I am” guy) found that same thing to be true himself. He realized the power of the mind to make reality out of fantasy and became skeptical of any of his own, untested thoughts.
“All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived . . . I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain.”
Put another way, in a maxim attributed to Anaïs Nin but which may date all the way back to the Talmud, “We don’t see the world as it is, but as we are.” So, the question becomes, how do we know what is reality and what is truth—or at least what is our truth? Like Descartes, I know my mind has the ability to make sense out of what it gets as input, but I am skeptical of its deductive reasoning. Of course, we must agree that there are simple things that are part of objective reality we would all agree upon. That is a chair and this is a table. I am writing a book or what I presume will become a book, and an outside observer watching me would probably conclude the same. So, I am not skeptical of all of my thoughts, just my interpretations, the interpretive thoughts that have to do with who I am and what I believe about myself and the world of my creation.
Every event in our lives basically consists of three elements. There is the experience itself—what actually, factually happened. Then there is what I would call the experience of the experience. In other words, let’s say a tree falls in the forest while I am hiking one day. The experience is that a tree fell down. But my experience of the experience of that tree falling is surprise (or perhaps fear if it happened to fall very close to me). The third element is what we might call the interpretation of the experience. That is what our mind does to make sense of the experience. I could perhaps take the interpretation that I am blessed and have a guardian angel watching out for me such that I was unscathed by the falling tree. Another interpretation could be that things like that are always happening to me and that I am a magnet for danger. And, of course there are probably a dozen more interpretations we could take of that one situation.
Over time these experiences and interpretations become the filter through which everything else is then perceived. The mind will make interpretations and then seeks confirmations of those interpretations in future events. By the time we have become adults, there have been billions of billions of such experiences and interpretations stored in our minds. Then, everything else will be measured and compared to that data base.
Everything that we perceive comes in through that filter and everything we say goes out through that filter. You and I could literally have the same experience together and come away with two completely different interpretations or understandings of that event. We could both witness the same traffic accident and touch the same bent fender, and yet we will file two different traffic reports.
What Descartes was referring to in his skepticism was not the perceived experience nor his experience of the experience. It was his interpretation, the story his mind made up about the experience, that he did not trust. And the same is true for me and you. Our self-concepts are constructed not of the experiences of our lives but rather from the stories we construct from our interpretations of those events and experiences.
Sarah and I can have a discussion one evening about what we are going to be doing the next day and so I will get up and start working. Shortly thereafter, Sarah will come into the room and ask what I am doing. I will most likely say something like “This is what we talked about doing last night.” “No we didn’t,” she’ll retort. “We discussed doing . . .(something I had not “heard”).” How, then could the two of us be in the same conversation and have come away with two different interpretations?
And that is, as I said, the overarching “why” behind this book—to learn why I am who I am, or who I have become—and in the process also discover why I do what I do. In doing so, my desire is also to help you to discover some of the same. “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it,” says social science researcher, Dr. Brené Brown. “Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
This is no simple task! For most of us, we cannot really tell the difference between the events of our lives and the interpretations we made of them. I have a friend who would always preface her opinions with the phrase, “Well, the fact is . . .” I would point out that it was not fact but was instead her perception of what happened and would try to help her separate her beliefs and opinions from the observable events. While she was unbelievably intelligent, it took years of doing that for her to understand that her perceptions often were not held by others—even other very smart people. Mostly this was because, as an extremely intelligent person, she had thought through all of the possibilities she was aware of and had arrived at her “obvious” conclusion. Her underlying belief was that if others did not see these things as “fact,” then they must not be very smart!
Eventually she would change her preface to “It’s my opinion that the facts of the situation are,” but there was still that belief that if others didn’t share that view, they were of lesser intellect. After many years of practice, she now asks others what they have observed and begins by challenging her own interpretation with their new information. In doing so, she has opened her eyes and now can see how each of us can see the same event and have different interpretation of that event. Furthermore, she sees that diversity as a beautiful element of the human experience. Sometimes it takes a powerful event to shake us out of this strongly held belief, and sometimes it is a slow, unfolding process. But in order to do the work of discerning the whys and the wherefores of our underlying beliefs and meaning-making structures, we must get to that realization that we have, in “fact,” interpreted the event. And it is the interpretation that lives on inside of us (not the event). The event occurred and passed long ago, but the memory and interpretative story about that event is what continues.
So, to return to the Cartesian skepticism, what we are challenged to do in learning how to feel (as in learning how to have good, effective, and useful feelings that would guide us in the best direction) is this ability to separate events from our interpretations and hold those interpretations with some degree of distrust.
You may never really know the full factual truth about life events and may come to the realization that truth and fact are only personal interpretations, but at least we can become more aware of the differences and distinctions. From that place we can begin to understand what our emotions are telling us and whether that is something on which we should act or not.
Questions to ponder
1. How confident are you about your perception of “reality?” What causes you to
question reality or at least your perception of it?
2. How might you become more conscious of the thoughts that are at the source
of your emotions and emotional states?
3. How have you begun “owning your interpretations,” and if you have not yet
taken that on, what might get you started on that path?
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